it can be self-sustaining both in conditioning patterns and in the internal consistency patterns of the neural systems. This model is relevant to both heterosexual and homosexual behaviour patterns, and contributes to the explanation of sexual variation in general.
Regarding the case studies featured throughout this book — naturally, all names have been changed and identifying features have been omitted from the clinical material to protect the identities of those involved. The stories have been chosen not because of their unique characteristics, but precisely because they are representative of the many common experiences that are aired in the psychologist’s room.
It is my hope and desire that this book helps in some way to motivate a regulation of sexual behaviours that will enhance the wellbeing of those engaged in sexual relationships. This helps not only the parties in the sexual relationship itself but also the community of which they are a part.
My thanks to all those people from whom I have learned so much, and that have made this book possible. Thanks also to Dr Cynthia Dixon and Dr Shaun Dempsey who read earlier manuscripts, and to Stephen May and his team for graciously taking this project on board.
Tony Schneider
March, 2019
Tony Schneider is a clinical psychologist who studied at the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University. After five years as a full-time academic in psychology at Murdoch University, Tony worked as an educational and developmental psychologist in childcare centres and in the private schools sector. He entered private practice in 1989 and has remained in full-time private practice since. Tony has maintained a consultancy for schools, but also branched out into trauma debriefing and consulting at a pain management clinic. For many years he also provided supervision in Murdoch University’s Master’s programs, both in clinical and educational psychology. Tony’s work as a clinician in private practice exposed him to a range of common clinical and relational issues, including trauma, grief and depression, anxiety, addictions, chronic pain, and problems in sexual relating. He has published several academic articles and book chapters. In 2013 his first book The Brain, the Clinician, and I: Neuroscience findings and the subjective self in clinical practice was published by Routledge.
In an era of great mobility and frequent dislocation, the idea of ‘home’ is profoundly important. Without home we are nomads, refugees in an alien place. We can become alone and disconnected, unknown and unacknowledged, without purpose or role, unstable and directionless. And when we are exiled from home, or simply leave the home we knew for somewhere ‘better’, does the longing for the home we first knew ever cease? Home is the safe place where we can rest and find refreshment, support, and encouragement. Home is where we began and where we wish to end, even if the place defining home changes.
Probably one of our most powerful drives is the desire for ‘home’, the place where we belong and where others agree we belong. MacKay (2013) lists the desire for ‘my place’ as one of the ten basic desires that drive us:
‘Home may be a multilayered concept but, for most of us, the deepest layer is located in our desire for a place that is unambiguously ours; a place that seems in harmony with us; that welcomes and comforts us; that says things about us we’re pleased to have said… [It] is partly an anchor, partly a refuge, partly a stable reference point in a world that seems kaleidoscopic in the complexity of its shifting patterns… [It] helps not only to locate us, but to frame us, to contribute to our sense of who we are’ (pp. 36–7).
It might be said that I belong to my home as much as it belongs to me. And although I belong to it, in a sense, I cannot really ‘own’ it as I might own a house. Mackay (2013) notes:
‘Once you look beyond the economics and the aesthetics, you realise that “home” can’t actually be owned at all. It’s an idea too deeply lodged, too big, too rich, too complex, too subtle for ownership’ (p. 65).
Nevertheless, ownership commonly associates with home and can become a basis for conflict where a home is shared. Furthermore, we might assert rights relating to our home — the right to stay where I belong; the right to express myself in the safety of home; the right to contribute to its arrangement and presentation; and the right to prevent violation of that space. Where home is shared, there will be rules, but good rules will feel familiar and natural, an expression of respect for each one sharing our home.
While ‘home’ is normally seen as a place in the external world, my body may also be thought of as home the place my subjective self necessarily lives. And, by extension, the person I share my body with in a sexual relationship also becomes associated with the ‘home’ that my body represents. If ‘home’ is about ‘belonging’, then the person I belong to and that belongs to me — that is, the relationship — might be considered a part of ‘our home’.
Typically there is a crisis in the idea of ‘home’ during or following adolescence, as the adolescent prepares to leave the home of childhood in order to establish a new home. And so it was that I left the home I was born into so that I might make a new home with my wife. My parents and I once shared the same home; but then I left that home. Subsequently, my wife and I became united both in our sexual relationship and in our living arrangements — we came to belong to each other and shared a new home in every sense. The context that oriented me and contributed to my identity shifted from the home of my birth and the people of my upbringing to that of my wife and the children we subsequently had. Here again I became known, accepted, loved and respected. Here was my new ‘home’, both physically and psychologically, with a purpose and role recognised and needed by my wife and family.
In this book I argue that, like procreation, bonding and belonging constitute primary functions of a sexual relationship, a relationship that might be conceptualised as a person’s psychological ‘home’. However, we will discover that there are also other functions in the sexual relationship which are not necessarily aligned with these functions. Indeed, there are many different kinds of sexual experience and sexual expression, some of which are not relational at all, either because they are fleeting experiences, or because they don’t involve another person. Our many drives and life experiences can bring dimensions into our sexual experiences that exclude the functions of procreation and belonging. A sexual relationship can create the foundation for belonging through the intimacy, love, trust, familiarity and commitment that accompanies such a relationship, and upon which such belonging depends. It can also serve as a vehicle for self-discovery and passing pleasure. At the same time, it can result in disappointment, emptiness and loneliness. Furthermore, belonging can be established but then be destroyed by the unauthorised entry of another person, leaving a sense of betrayal, disconnectedness, loss of self-esteem, and disorientation. A kind of ‘home-invasion’. In other words, while a sexual relationship can create the context for wellbeing and belonging, it can also result in alienation and mental anguish.
An understanding of the complexities of sexual behaviour is critical when working with mental health problems that give rise to, or result from, sexual behaviour. Whether dealing with the trauma of sexual abuse, the pain of infidelity, self-rejection that leads to social withdrawal, or crises in sexual orientation; the need to understand sexual behaviour will play an important role in clinical practice. Surprisingly, until recently research and theory relating to sexual behaviour has received disproportionately small attention in the psychological literature compared to the attention it receives in politics and the media. The sexualisation of advertising, sexual themes in the arts, child sex abuse scandals,
